Biomedical Imaging Informatics Core The Biomedical Imaging Informatics core (Bll) will provide critical integration imaging data generated within the network into the NIH sponsored National Cancer Imaging Archive (NCIA) and the cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) program. The Bll be directed by Dr. Fred Prior and staffed by members of the Electronic Radiology Laboratory (ERL) at WUSTL. Dr. Prior and other member of ERL have been actively involved in caBIG's imaging workspace and the lab is the prime contractor on the extensible Imaging Platform project [91]. In addition ERL has developed a non-NCI instance of NCIA which is currently being used to capture digitized pathology slide images as part of an NCI pilot project. The Bll will draw heavily on this experience base. In addition to its caBIG involvement ERL has developed an image library for the National Lung Screening Trial [92] and is the imaging core for 3 on-going multi-center clinical trials. ERL has developed a complete suite of software tools and operational procedures to support imaging based clinical trials. ERL staff members including Dr. Prior and Mr. Moore have extensive experience with the DICOM standard for medical image communication, including being a co-author of the original standard (Prior) and author of the first, open source, reference implementation (Moore) [93]. In support of this NTR application, ERL will establish an infrastructure for capturing and managing all image data generated by the WUSTL network. The focal point of this effort will be the NCIA instance in ERL which will be extended to support optical and photoacoustic images. ERL will also create one or more targeted image analysis applications using the XIP builder tool. New DICOM data formats to support photoacoustic, optical imaging and specific pre-clinical image types (small-animal imaging) will be defined and prototyped as part of this project. ERL will also support collaboration and data sharing among members of the WUSTL network and the broader NTR network.